At the Library

**SPOILER ALERT** I wanted to love this book, but it disappointed me deeply. The writing is engaging, the characters are interesting, the switcheroo premise is interesting & believably executed, the development kept me turning pages and was often jaw-dropping. But... and this is a BIG but... this book wanted to be so radical, and it wants to pretend that it IS so radical, and it's not.
This author missed such an amazing opportunity to examine the nature of power itself, rather than just switching gender roles (we've seen that in so many B movies already!). Once again, 'POWER' = the power to hurt, to coerce, to destroy. I kept waiting for the author to make a radical move and show us that POWER is also (I'd argue more fundamentally) the power to create, love, and heal. What if giving women this new gift had enabled at least SOME of them to coalesce in joyful solidarity? What if the twist had given us a real show-down between two radically different conceptions of power? I kept waiting for the author to show me something new. All I got was 'power corrupts women as quickly as it does men.' A valid hypothesis, but nothing as fresh or radical as the blurbs led me to hope.